Summer Bonus Episode: Gardens Everywhere!

to make you sound like an expert. We are on summer break right now, but because Molly and I cannot stop our plant addictions, we are bringing you some mini episodes to brighten up your feed and grow your plant curiosity. Throughout the summer, we'll be dropping incredible stories from growers, advice from experts, and we'll even have some fun conversations

around fascinating plant facts. So for this bonus episode, we are sharing some of the most interesting and unusual places people have grown vegetable gardens, proving no matter where you are, you've got enough room for a garden, from tiny houses to difficult soil. We love hearing about the clever ways people have grown plants and seemingly ungrowable spaces, just personally I feel like it gives me even more motivation and no excuse for not keeping my plants alive and completely

ordinary circumstances. So today we are sharing four unexpected places you can grow plants. Number one potholes. So we all know no one likes a pothole. But in Toronto, residents in the Summerhill area had been complaining about a giant pothole to city officials for like months, and when the complaints fell on deaf ears, they decided to take these matters into their own hands by launching a highly unusual protest.

All these fed up locals planted protest tomatoes inside the road hazard to make a community garden of sorts, and as the tomatoes grew and found their way onto social media as things do, all these embarrassed city officials quickly addressed the issue and fixed up the pothole. Now, as for the tomato plants, they also got a happy ending because they were transferred to a local community garden where they're living out their lives above ground. Two make use

of an abandoned train tunnel. So in New South Wales, Australia, Dr Noel Arnold has found a unique place to grow exotic mushrooms, and he uses an abandoned railway tunnel. He doesn't just produce a few mushrooms for home cooking, though. Dr Arnold actually manages to produce over one point five tons of mushrooms every week, every week, and apparently the tunnel's damp conditions create an unusually controlled environment for both

temperature and humidity. Because mushrooms don't need light for photosynthesis, they are also not bothered by this lack of sunshine, So today Dr Arnold grows everything from shitaki and chestnut mushrooms to fluorescent pink and blue oyster mushrooms at his least sun exotic mushroom farm. The mushrooms are sold to restaurants across the country, but if you want to sample the wears in person, Dr Arnold gives tours of his mushroom farm twice a year, three on a ball gown.

In two thousand twelve, Stevie Famulari launched a line of dresses known as Garden Parties, and her dresses use this felt like fabric that holds seeds and retains moisture in a unique way, such that the dresses actually grow flower and reseed themselves. It's literally like wearing your garden around, and they are renewable. As she told Syracuse dot Com, one of the opera gowns she designed has already died

once and grown back. Instead of floral prints, each dress has over five thousand living blossoms, including poppies, violets, and baby sprouts. But the idea for the fashion line comes from an unusual place. Famulari actually came up with the idea when she first saw these landscape engineers studying geo textile erosion. They were spring down the road and trying to make seeds grow on a vertical surface without falling off. So after years of experimenting with that technology, she came

up with this fabric that creates its own ecosystem. Of course, the dresses aren't just appealing to hobbyist gardeners. They've made waves in the fashion world too, and as one stylist noted, Familarity's opera gown is beautiful, but it's her stylish long coat that could actually work as a replacement for for in years to come. Plus, it supposedly smells like spring for under the sea, the ocean is home to a lot of vegetation like seaweed and kelp, But do you

ever think about basil growing there. Nemo's Garden off the coast of Noi and northwestern Italy is using underwater pods to grow vegetables and herbs in the ocean. So this all started in two thousand twelve when Sergio Gamberini, who's a scuba diving professional and trade chemical engineer, was hanging

out with some local farmers whose crops were suffering. It was all disastrous because of the cold weather, and so on a lark, he wondered if he could grow plants underwater where they wouldn't be subject to the same weather conditions or even things like pests. So after building this little plastic biosphere and watching basil plants sprout underwater in less than forty eight hours, Gambrini knew he was onto something.

Today he has six greenhouses underwater where he maintains a farm of over seven hundred plants, including strawberries, lettuce, tomato, zucchini, peas, mint time and even alo vera. And for me, I just loved the idea that when I go blueberry picking with my kids, it will be underwater from now on.

That's it for today's bonus episode. Check back here again for more bonus episodes this summer, and don't forget no matter what season it is or where you're at in your gardening journey, there's some incredible resources for you on the Miracle Grow website. Humans Growing Stuff is a collaboration from I Heart Radio and your friends at Miracle Grow. Our show was written and produced by Molly Sosha and need Mongy Chat. This episode was edited and engineered by Matt Stillo.